Walking out of T.um, I kept thinking about two science-
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The Peripheral and Star Trek. In The Peripheral, people
from a seemingly wealthy, paradisiacal late-22nd-
century London reach back to talk to folks in a
struggling 2030s America. How did this gorgeous
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climate change that killed 80 percent of the people on
Earth and left the ecosystem dependent on man-made
air-purifying structures.
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Star Trek’s similarly nanotech-enabled Earth is
peaceful, global, healthy, and post-scarcity—because it
had been ravaged by a mid-21st-century nuclear war
that wiped out most of humanity and then rebuilt after
decades of struggle and misery.
The digital city gurus providing visions for the Mori Art
Museum seem to have made a similar calculus. Oceanix
City is a sustainable landscape for a much smaller
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after the seas have risen and after the wars and
pandemics.
Mori Art
Museum’s
Oceanix City is
a sustainable
landscape for a
much smaller
population on
a very different
planet.